March 1, 2008
Bloggers tackle the Supreme Court and the Exxon oil spill
Three quick updates as bloggers attempt to wrestle with Wednesday's Supreme Court gathering to hear oral arguments in the punitive damages phase of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.Long and fascinating, here is Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News in Washington, D.C., Oil and Water:
The most fascinating thing about the argument—and it really was one of the most fascinating arguments of the term--was watching the justices explore different proposals and options to put some limits on punitive damages.I tried to capture a bit of this in my own story for the Cordova Times, here -- how it did seem even to my uninformed eyes that this was a rockin' day at the court, and that Ginsburg ruled the day.You saw Justice Scalia—who has long refused to put constitutional limits on punitive damages (he doesn't see it in the Constitution any more than he sees a right to abortion in the Constitution)—free to weigh in and discuss a framework.
You saw Chief Justice Roberts, who has not ruled squarely on that broader constitutional issue, expressing skepticism about punitive damages and exploring the differences in maritime law—an area he knows well, having argued (and won) the important maritime case, Grubart v Great Lakes Dredge and Dock, which came about after the great Chicago flood. That case, written by Justice Souter, is one of his favorites—as a lawyer he quoted it frequently as an advocate, because it squarely rejected confusing multi-factor tests for admiralty jurisdiction.You saw Ginsburg—who always is prepared at argument, but yesterday exhibited an almost astoundingly expert level of knowledge about this tortured and complex case—pressing Dellinger on the record, on precedent and on federal procedural rules. It was an extraordinarily impressive display, and to many observers she clearly got the best of the argument.
At Scotusblog, former Baltimore Sun courts reporter Lyle Denniston weighs in with Commentary: Exxon may both lose and win.
First impressions, based on what was said or intimated at a fast-paced oral argument, can be quite misleading. This Court usually divides quite deeply in considering punitive damages claims — a factor that is even more complex in this case, because one Justice (Samuel A. Alito, Jr.) is not taking part, leaving at least a chance of a 4-4 split, perhaps on some but not all issues. But first impressions also might qualify as reasonable reactions, when what was asked and answered is parsed closely, and when atmospherics are taken into account. It was apparent that Exxon’s lawyer, Washington attorney Walter Dellinger, was under serious challenge throughout his argument, and critically so on his efforts to get the Court to forbid any punitive damages award for this kind of maritime accident. But it was equally apparent that the lawyer for the individuals and businesses who were awarded punitive damages, Stanford professor and lawyer Jeffrey L. Fisher, had to deal with a spreading view on the bench that there had to be some curbs on punitive damages in the maritime context — especially when the punitive verdict runs into the billions.And finally, here's a podcast from the Federalist Society for Law and Public Studies, direct link here. This gives a more skeptical view of the plaintiffs' arguments for those seeking a balance of information.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:16 PM in Alaska
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February 29, 2008
My rookie try at covering the Supreme Court
I run into Robert Dillon, with whom I worked briefly in Anchorage in 2004, on the Mall in Washington. Dillon was covering the Supreme Court for the Fairbanks News-Miner, me for the Cordova Times. We both worked earlier for Alaska Newspapers, me as a designer, he as the editor of the Tundra Drums.It's certainly a jolt to go from being in a home office in Baltimore to joining the press corps at the Supreme Court.
I usually spend my weekends copyediting six rural newspapers in Alaska. The dress code for this job is relaxed, at best. I interpret it to allow me to wear, as a sampling at the low end, a paint-splattered University of Maryland sweatshirt, grey Lee jeans and Timberlands with caulk on them.
With any luck, I remember to wear a bandana while doing home improvement projects sandwiched around the editing, so maybe my hair isn't paint splattered as well ... maybe not.
I fit in fairly well with our idiosyncratic Upper Fells Point neighborhood with its mix of arty types, immigrants, blue-collar workers and casually dressed professionals.
Not so well in go-go, busy, hyperaffluent Washington, D.C., the 21st century's answer to the glory of Rome at its height.
So when the Cordova, Alaska, editor of the Cordova Times, Joy Landaluce, suggested I cover the Supreme Court hearing on the Exxon Valdez oil spill on Wednesday and file a story, a major cleanup was in order before I could be presented to the public.
Help came from many quarters. My neighbor Blaire cleaned her Wal-Mart briefcase of cat hair and lent it to me for my notebook, wallet, pens and camera.
She suggested buying black tights at Walgreens -- warmer than stockings, she said -- and wearing some light makeup. While at Walgreens, I also grabbed a box of L'Oreal hair color to address my roots.
My sister Maureen sold me and shipped to Baltimore her wonderful Canon G2 Powershot to take pictures of many Alaska events surrounding the Supreme Court hearing.
My boss in Alaska, editor Randall Howell, and administrative editor Tammy Judd sent a request for press credentials to the nice staff at the Supreme Court information office.
The Supreme Court deputy information officer approved my request and noted a dress code: business jacket mandatory even for female Scotus reporters. And nothing but pens and a notebook would be allowed into the actual courtroom.
I had never owned a business suit in my life. Mindful of my laughable hourly rate working for Alaska Newspapers, I drove to Value Village in Highlandtown and perused the racks of various blue pinstripe numbers. I found a lovely brown suit for $9.98, a new belt for 99 cents and a Liz Claiborne black blouse for $2.98.
To quote the president, mission accomplished.
My sister Sharon and her husband Rob offered lodging a few Metro stops from the court. Rob lent me his aging but servicable Toshiba laptop and Sharon lent her cell phone.
It become obvious that not only did I need a wardrobe for this event, but that I lagged technology by not even having a cell phone, laptop or a professional-grade digital camera. My home office is fairly up to date but I didn't have what I needed to cover a major story without family support, for which I am eternally grateful.
Lamont watched the pets and bought the car down for my use after the court hearing.
And, a family friend, Lee Arnold, counsel to a Republican member of the House of Representatives, who is a fine legal mind, checked my stories for errors, and Eric Caplan of Caplan Communications, publicist for the Cordova-based activists, snared me a career-saving cubicle at the National Press Club to work at on deadline for my preview story the night before the court arguments.
So, all spiffed up, I got the court Wednesday morning about 90 minutes early, and met the Alaskans who were thawing out in the hallway after spending a frigid night outdoors in sleeping bags.
In the press room, in strode Pete Williams, the court reporter for NBC News, Joan Biskupic of USA Today, Bob Barnes of the Washington Post, and all the "bigs" of the Supremes' court media.
Then an elderly gentleman with a cane came in, smiled, and introduced himself. "Hello," he said. "I'm covering this for the Cordova Times." (!)
I was more than a little territorial, proud to be representing the tiny ground-central town most affected by the oil spill.
"I'm covering the case for the Cordova Times," I said. "Who are you?"
He was the husband of a former Times editor, it turned out. The court staff was kind to let him in, as he ostentiously lacked pen, notebook or other accoutrements of a working reporter. He ended up essentially in a hallway behind the working press.
Around 9:20 a.m., 40 minutes before the court would convene, the "bigs" were escorted out first to sit in the permanent press corps section to the right of the justices' bench.
Next came the rest of us to be portioned out in alcoves crammed with chairs, behind the "bigs." The chairs were packed like in a really popular comedy club, reminding me of D.C.'s old Cellar Door.
Robert Dillon, a former colleague at Alaska Newspapers stringing for the Fairbanks News-Miner, knew what to expect.
Those of us brand new to this experience -- namely most of the Alaska fishing town journalists, from Kodiak mainly -- quizzed folks from USA Today and the National Law Journal on how to interpret what we saw.
"Can we interpret what the judges think by their questions, or is that a mistake?" I asked two reporters from the National Law Journal.
"Yes, you can interpret," they told me, unless the justices were obviously playing devil's advocate. They said one could start by understanding that justices Scalia and Thomas were resolutely pro-business, and thus likely votes for Exxon, and then study the others' remarks for clues to their leanings.
We less-celestial journalists were rounded into our alcove seats, and our alcove had three Kodiakers, myself, and the suffering-from-a-bad-cold Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com.
Just before 10 a.m., Toby Sullivan of the Anchorage Press, a former commercial fisherman and plaintiff from Kodiak, and I were inexplicably singled out from everyone else and summoned to rise and follow a brusque female officer of the court.
I worried that we were getting moved from decent seats in front of our alcove to Siberia, farther back near the hallway, alongside my fake Cordova Times counterpart. If I was demoted down to the hallway, where officers signaled which justice was speaking using a number of fingers and a code for each justice, because you couldn't see anything, my reporting was going to suffer even more than it did already from not knowing the court in any great detail.
I was about to protest when we were actually led, not into Siberia, but forward into the chamber proper and shown seats in with the "bigs." The little Cordova Times was about to be seated beside the Washington Post. Though honored that Toby and I were recognized as legit, and that the court officers were kind enough to show courtesy to journalists covering the oral arguments for residents of small-town Alaska, my seat at the end of the row seemed even more claustrophobic than the seat in the alcove.
"Dana, do you want my seat?" I called to Dana Milbank, the Washington Post political reporter superstar, who had arrived late and been shoved into our alcove.
Milbank had no idea who I was yet didn't question why I would know who he was. If you know you are a "big" you are not surprised at being known to strangers. Dana said sure if I was sure.
I was sure I didn't want to be packed in with the bigs. I wanted back with the "smalls." This was a David vs. Goliath case, and I was happier with the Alaskans.
Dana sat down a seat or two away from his Post colleague Bob Barnes, who mockingly asked if he'd bought anything to write with -- color columnists can just sit and listen, he implied -- and I returned to the Official Alaska Alcove to sit by Dahlia Lithwick.
Dahlia actually mentioned the invitation to Toby and me to move at the start of her fabulous column -- fabulous in its writing style, its sympathy to Alaskans and the fact she wrote while fighting a wicked respiratory disorder. Her column is headlined, Oil and Water: The Exxon Valdez case runs aground at the Supreme Court:
The high court is teeming with Alaskans this morning, and the press office has made a superhuman effort to accommodate them all. ... Outside the court, Alaskans hold banners demanding justice. And flanking me in the press section today are reporters from at least four different Alaskan newspapers. One is himself a plaintiff in the Exxon suit. A few moments before argument begins, a passel of them are even moved up to the two front rows reserved for the permanent press corps—sacred ground to which your ordinary beat reporter dare not aspire.Milbank made good use of the seat I had been offered to crane his neck and listen, rarely taking notes but soaking it all in. His column is entitled, At the High Court, Damage Control:
Exxon Mobil, the giant oil corporation appearing before the Supreme Court yesterday, had earned a profit of nearly $40 billion in 2006, the largest ever reported by a U.S. company -- but that's not what bothered Roberts. What bothered the chief justice was that Exxon was being ordered to pay $2.5 billion -- roughly three weeks' worth of profits -- for destroying a long swath of the Alaska coastline in the largest oil spill in American history. "So what can a corporation do to protect itself against punitive-damages awards such as this?" Roberts asked in court.The other major thing I noticed was that NPR's Nina Totenberg, who had the seat very closest to the bench, was wearing a bright, shiny, light brown leather jacket in violation of the dress code that had sent me to Value Village.The lawyer arguing for the Alaska fishermen affected by the spill, Jeffrey Fisher, had an idea. "Well," he said, "it can hire fit and competent people."
The rare sound of laughter rippled through the august chamber. The chief justice did not look amused.
As I had been temporarily led to a seat in the row behind her, the court officer had told me to "put away my sunglasses," hanging on the front of my blouse. "They're reading glasses," I replied, alarmed that they she might confiscate them, and I might need them.
"Well put them away," she repeated, and I complied, though they didn't have a fraction of the shine and potential of Nina's leather jacket to distract the Supremes from their Very Important Work.
Oh, here's a link to my curtainraiser story, Cordovans vs. Exxon: Spill victims plead passionate case as high court hears appeal, and a scan of this week's Cordova Times with my story appears below.
My story on the Supreme Court's oral arguments is here online: "Supreme Court weighs case to cut oil-spill award."
And thus have I covered my biggest story in my 35-year career while working for my littlest newspaper, the Cordova Times, circulation 1,000.
UPDATE: My curtainraiser story was mentioned in the Anchorage Daily News Newsreader, image here:
Click above
My second front-page, with a story I wrote, my photo of lead attorney Jeffrey Fisher, and a graphic I helped to put together:
Click above to read full-size version.
April 16, 2006
The marvels of newspapering in Alaska
It was fascinating during 2004-05 to be working for a crusading community newspaper such as the Tundra Drums (see about its award, here) after a career with stops at the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post.
On the occasion of the Drums' award, I'll note some impressions of newspaper life in Alaska, based on my own background.
I started out in community newspapers, beginning with the Montgomery Journal (which ceased publication last year) in Chevy Chase and later Rockville, Md., and progressing to English papers, including the Surrey Advertiser, and thence to the Gaithersburg Gazette, back in Maryland.
As much as the resources and worldliness of the staff increased as I moved in 1986 to the Sun and in 1991 to the Post, something was missing. Journalists at big newspapers are more likely to view themselves as elites than do the young scrappers at a local paper.
Higher salaries and living in more expensive neighborhoods also tend to push big-city reporters and editors much, much farther from the pulse of the community, their readers. In addition, success depends on assiduous politicking to ensure advancement in the newspaper heirarchy. As Steve Sailor writes here,
To reach a high position in American life, it doesn't pay to waste time associating with a wide range of your fellow human beings. You are much better off spending as much time as possible schmoozing other ambitious people who can help you out. It pays to adopt whatever conventions they exhibit in terms of what you are supposed to talk and write about.
Rural newspaper editors must still interact with a wide range of fellow human beings. Community newspapers in Alaska, given the state's isolated, off-road towns reachable only by airplane, boat, dog sled or snowmachine, serve as the town criers, not much changed since frontier days. You aren't isolated from your readers. The editors live in tiny communities where everyone knows everyone else, and play a far more delicate balancing act than, say, does the editor of the New York Times.
Thus returning to community newspapers in Alaska, beginning in June 2004, on site in Anchorage, felt wonderful. There wasn't the sense of working in a bubble sealed off from those whose life would be affected by the articles we ran.
My job was to help design the Tundra Drums, as well as the Cordova Times, and periodically to design the other papers in the chain (the Seward Phoenix-Log, the Bristol Bay Times, and the Dutch Harbor Fisherman). I also designed and filled in as a reporter for the Arctic Sounder, which gave me nine fascinating days on site in Barrow, the northernmost U.S. city.
The average "niceness" quotient of the editors, reporters, designers and production staff zoomed compared to bigger papers. Of course, this is in part because people in Alaska, journalists and non-journalists alike, are far nicer than those of us on the driven East Coast.
Front page of the Cordova Times. Laying out photos like this one made designing an Alaska newspaper a one-of-a-kind experience.
Further, the journalists were jacks-of-all trades, much different to the highly specialized East Coast scribes.
Each editor wrote articles and editorials and sports stories, shot photographs, and typed in the police log, births, obits, pet of the week, calendar, sun and tides and letters to the editor, and shepherded the columnists' work to Anchorage.
Some of the editors knew a fair amount about design. This often made communication far easier than it ever was for me at the Washington Post, where the visual illiteracy of some of the editors, as well as the blind spot some artists had toward being careful with text content, made being a graphics editor on the National and Foreign desks a great challenge.
These Alaska editors and reporters were a different breed altogether, and working with them was fun from Day One.
The most macho we called the Sounder Boys. These were Tim McDonald and James Mason, who worked in the Arctic Sounder bureaus in Barrow and Kotzebue respectively. They were no strangers to liquor, hunting (including Inupiat whale hunts, in the icy dark of early spring), rifles, scopes, snowmachines, dune buggies and husky dogs.
Getting them to file their copy on time was difficult for every reason imaginable, from them not always taking deadlines seriously to terrible phone and e-mail connections not of their making.
But ultimately they hearkened back to the era depicted in 
The Front Page, Northern Exposure style. They bore no relation to the sometimes paunchy and pale desk-jockeys, in blue shirts and wrinkled khakis, who manned metropolitan dailies. They had to survive, work and be effective in predominantly Native communities, and this made their newspapering quite unique.
Every day -- from my very first, when a young, skinny moose walked down the street outside the Alaska Newspapers' office in South Anchorage -- was full of wonder. I commuted by bike along the psychedic purple fireweed-lined paths of the Campbell Creek trail, listening to giant, scarlet-backed salmon in their last days fight upstream along its gravel bed. (Yes, you can hear their stomachs slapping against the rocks.) My last week, heading home, I passed a bigger moose at the side of the trail.
At my desk in the office, my work involved taking the reporters' stories and headlines and photos and reworking them around the ads provided by the ad scheduler, using specialized software (in this case, Quark Xpress). As I poured the stories into boxes, made them fit, and applied headline font sizes and cutline formatting, I let myself absorb the content, of which details below.
My last few days, I suggested to the editor-in-chief, Rose Ragsdale, and the design editor, Kristy Bernier, that I would love to continue working long distance from my home in Baltimore while they looked for my replacement.
We tried the experiment. That it worked was a testament to the open-mindedness of the individual editors to e-mail the components of their papers 4,000 miles away, to a rowhouse in Fells Point, Baltimore, Maryland, and ultimately after corrections, to let the finished product return by e-mail to the main office in Anchorage.
We knew the Sounder Boys were a handful to handle even from Anchorage, and two other editors, both female, seemed more conducive to our experiment in having an off-site designer.
Joy Landaluce of the Cordova Times and Naomi Klouda of the Drums were the most amenable to this arrangement. Every week I tried to make sure they were really happy with how their papers looked, enough to make up for the inconvenience of not having them designed in their home state.
If anything, this arrangement was almost typical of Alaska, with 15 percent of its employees not living in state. (Many live in Seattle and come up for intensive work stints, and return home.) And the flexibility of using technology creatively is extremely important for remote Alaska.
Every weekend for more than 1-1/2 years, I lived on Alaska time (4 hours later than Baltimore) and took a virtual step into a foreign world.
They sent me material each weekend that ranged from hard-hitting exposes to photos of incredible, unaffected charm, of children hunting moose or landing fish, or babies born or elders who had passed. I coudn't help but be fascinated by the stories and photos I was e-mailed every week to lay out on the pages.
Naomi Klouda, the Drums editor, and her reporter, Jon Grover, aided by roving reporter Alex DeMarban flying in from Anchorage, tackled every big issue there was to examine in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta: health care, policing, waste removal, village budgets running dry, politics, tribal organizations, dance festivals, Native arts and crafts.
That was the big, "important" stuff. The newspapers often carried stories of national and international importance, including oil drilling in ANWR (the Arctic Sounder), the crash of a soybean freighter in the Aleutians (the Dutch Harbor Fisherman), and the visit of Sen. Ted Stevens to Bethel and Nome to keep Lisa Murkowski in the Senate and preserve its Republican majority (the Drums and the Sounder).
But the columns, letters, recipes, calendar and police logs were almost more interesting. Every single paragraph in the Tundra Drums and the Cordova Times seems to tell a fascinating story of a place quite different to any other -- quite appealing to any traveler or amateur geographer or reader who likes writing with a strong sense of place.
I probably could have made at least twice as much per hour designing at a major newspaper, but designing the Tundra Drums in particular made up for it with exotic subject matter. These included such staples as:
- Columns by the wonderfully monikered John Active and Harley Sundown, Yup'ik Eskimos who write eloquent, first-rate essays about anything from myths and legends, family lore and Russian colonization, to how to construct a fence out of wood pallets.
- The amazing "Millie's Kitchen Korner." Not only might she provide recipes involving moose or wild tundra berries, Millie Bentley would always range widely into community issues, acting as a sort of Talk of the Town and Social Register as well. When Dr. Lucy Bayles's husband died suddenly, and Millie offered consolation before proceeding to the week's recipe, I almost felt I lived in Bethel.
Copy editors Victoria Zerbe, Kate Golden, Laurel Bill and I had a quiet, affectionate giggle at some of the more provincial aspects of Millie -- the extra K in Kitchen Korner, and the time she told of an intestinal eruption as a result of eating bran muffins. For a good while, I didn't understand why each of the rural papers gave so much space to recipes by Millie and other local columnists. Time revealed that the Alaska winter passes slowly, and Arctic Sounder editor James Mason (a grizzled, bachelor, macho guy) explained even he really liked running recipes and trying them himself.
- Thank you letters. Maybe nothing screamed of the different relationship between a newspaper and its readers than the Tundra Drums' letters pages. While letter writers to the Sun and the Post complain about the mightiest people in the land, in the Tundra Drums, many column inches are devoted to thank yous:
- Thank you to the Alaska Commercial Store for plastic plates for the Fourth of July picnic.
- Thank you ("quyana") to 50 people who helped when a village elder died, and to Hageland Air for donating a bush plane to transport the body.
- Thank you to the bands that helped raise money for tsunami victims, with the spirit of Native phrasing: "You have the great blessing from the four corners of the world."
- Thank you to the Alaska Commercial Store for plastic plates for the Fourth of July picnic.
- Prisoners' letters. These complained in enormous detail about all aspects of their trial and current incarceration, and seemed to blanket every publication in the entire state, judging by how a prisoner from down near Juneau would write to an editor in the Western bush. If the thank-you letters failed to materialize, the editors would run these. Wonder if running them simultaneously puzzled and entertained the readers as much as they did me?
- The photos. Each Sunday, photo editor Robert DeBerry would e-mail a compressed folder of each week's edited photos. The art told stories of soldiers returning from Iraq (Alaska has many soldiers and the nation's highest percentage of veterans), delicate-looking women hunters that had bagged a moose, fishermen plying the Kuskokwim, babies that had been born, sundogs and ice and riotous flower gardens, and frankly adorable photos of the children at Mikelnguut Elitnaurviat Elementary in Bethel celebrating Thanksgiving -- a ring of little Eskimos dressed as Pilgrims and Indians.
- Obits. These told the history of our biggest and second-youngest state. Few of the elders seemed to have just lived a routine life and died. Many had played huge roles in helping a remote Eskimo people enter the modern world.
Or they told other stories, both of loss and of tragedy. There was the poignant photo that arrived one week of an innocent-looking 11-year-old boy, with anthracite eyes and Asian cheekbones, lost playing in a bend of the Kuskokwim river.
The contrast between designing the Tundra Drums and its sister paper, the Cordova Times, was often striking, as the later was in a largely Scandinavian town of fishermen's descendants. Young people in Cordova seemed glossy and often extremely beautiful or handsome, as the editor provided pictures of them at swimming contests or softball tournaments.
In Bethel, Alaska, often the news of young people was sadder, and basic, and told of dangers inherent to life in Bush Alaska that modernity had not fully eradicated.
Still, the harshness of Fate often touched Cordova, too, as it lost one of its residents, who mourned the breakup of his marriage by taking a vacation to a sunny paradise. His bungalow in Thailand was smashed by the tsunami. And the repercussions of the Exxon Valdez still haunt this town, 17 years later.
- The police blotter. For the Tundra Drums especially, this could read like a Jack London story. Here's an example from last year:
Feb. 12, St. Mary's. Search and Research/Snowmachine. At 4 p.m., Alaska State Troopers in St. Mary's were notified that Clarence Sipary, 39, of Pitka's Point, and Glenda Andrews, 25, of St. Mary's, had departed from Pitka's Point headed to Pilot Station on Feb. 10, 2005 at around 9 p.m. on a Polaris RMK snowmachine. Friends reported them overdue on Feb. 11, 2005. Local search teams were sent on Feb. 12, 2005, with no sign of the two. Efforts continued on Feb. 13, 2005. On Feb. 14, the weather improved enough for troopers to fly over the area and locate a single snowmachine track, which led to an open hole in the ice in the middle of the Yukon River near the confluence with the Andreafsky River. Local search crews attempted to drag the river on Feb. 15th and 16th, 2005 without any success. Weather and ice conditions have made it impossible to continue dragging the river and on the evening of Feb. 16, 2005 the decision was made to suspend the search until conditions improve.
In Baltimore, our police blotter is full of bar shootings and drug drive-bys. In St. Mary's in Western Alaska, Mother Nature bests innocent humans, with no record except for a snowmachine track ending at a hole in the river.
Meanwhile, the Cordova Times police blotter was altogether more light-hearted, with people reporting stray dogs, children staying out too late and even the tangling of a baby otter in the fishing nets on the dock.
Given the tradition of the thank you in Alaska, I will close with one to everyone at Alaska Newspapers. Often it was a laugh a minute with Robert, Heather Resz, Kristy Bernier and Pat from production and Laurel Bill (who gives great back rubs to stressed-out designers).
Thanks especially to Rose Ragsdale, my former Baltimore Sun colleague. Rose, as editor in chief, ignored my protestations that I did not know newspaper design, only book design, and brought me up to Anchorage in June 2004 for a one-in-a-lifetime experience of learning how to design newspapers, and rural Alaska ones at that. She also housed and fed me dinner during that time. (As well as driving me, with her husband Darrell, to Seward, Homer and Talkeetna for some amazing sight-seeing of zillions of eagles.)
And to Naomi Klouda, for without hesitation signing on to a designer in far-away Baltimore, and sending me an ulu knife and Yup'ik slippers so that my home, and not just my computer files with her stories and finished papers, had a strong flavor of Alaska.
Quyana Rose and Naomi!
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:30 PM in Alaska
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April 14, 2006
Tundra Drums wins Alaska press award
It's well past time I wrote more about my fun experiences in Alaska, working for a chain of rural newspapers. (See more here.)
But first congratulations are in order.
The Tundra Drums weekly newspaper in Bethel, Alaska, has won an award in the Alaska Press Club 2006 contest for its examination of the rural justice system in Western Alaska.
My friend Naomi Klouda, the editor of the Tundra Drums, asked me to set up a Web page with the series, which you can see here.
Kudos also to former Alaska Newspapers editors Rose Ragsdale and Alex DeMarban for their keen interest in the matter of rural justice and support for Naomi's investigation.
I played a small role in the series, as the designer (by long distance) of Part 1. (Kristy Bernier, my former boss, designed Parts 2 through 4.)
In this isolated part of the world, villagers may have to wait "hours, days or even weeks for a distant non-resident trooper" to come investigate crimes, given limits on what each village's public safety officer can do. It's amazing to wonder -- given the vast distances and adverse weather of this area, as well as the interplay of tribal and Western notions of justice -- how crimes are handled.
To the social anthropolist, the situation also raises the question of how a public safety officer, often a native of his village, can be expected to impartially deal with crimes such as a cousin or friend bringing in alcohol to a dry village.
Domestic violence, assault and theft, often related to abuse of alcohol, occurs in these villages. And many deaths ruled as suicide occur under murky conditions and may actually be homicides. Part 2 of the Tundra Drums series describes villagers with eyewitness accounts of fatal attacks that did not lead to investigations or the filing of charges.
Part 2 also describes how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, just across the border in the Yukon, station an officer in every Native village.
Naomi, who I previously wrote about here -- "Beautiful slippers from Western Alaska" -- says farewell to her job this week after two eventful years in the harsh Bush country of Alaska, and plans to locate to the more congenial and artsy town of Homer, on the Kenai Peninsula.
It's a well-deserved change of scenery. Many of us who know Naomi, shown below, admire her prodigious energy and courage in an extremely demanding editing job in one of the harshest climates on Earth.
Sometimes we'd be assembling the paper and she would mention "it's blowing 50 miles an hour out there" or "they cancelled the Kusko 300 [sled race] because it's too cold" -- explaining that a pan of water thrown in the air froze immediately, even before falling to the ground, and the dogs might not survive.
The morning after the November 2004 election, all communication was cut off for hours to the paper, and I (working in Baltimore, 4,000 miles away) pulled together a table of local election results via the board of elections Web site in Anchorage. That may be a testament to the Internet, but it also tells that it's not so easy running a newspaper in rural Alaska. It takes a lot of perseverance and calm.
Naomi also faced down some who tried to intimidate her (via a hit-and-run car accident while she was out walking her dog) into not revealing problems with the local hospital and with court and crime issues. Without harping too much on the point, Alaska, as wondrous and grand as it is in most ways, is not always an easy state for women, and rural Alaska more so.
Naomi dealt with a lot in Bethel, from $9/gallon, spoiled milk to the intricacies of the Yup'ik and gussak (white) societies. Hope she enjoys Homer. Say hi to the otters and eagles for me and hope you catch some fine halibut!
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:20 PM in Alaska
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February 25, 2006
Beautiful slippers from Western Alaska
I received an interesting e-mail from my friend, Naomi Klouda, editor of the Tundra Drums in Bethel, Alaska.
She had some months ago sent me an ulu, a Yup'ik Eskimo cutting knife, that I use constantly for chopping food. Her latest e-mail was to bring a bit more of Alaska into my world here in Baltimore.
You can click on the picture of Naomi at right to read a pdf of her article in the Tundra Drums, dated Feb. 2, about her boots, handmade by Helen Nelson, 89, of Napakiak. She raves about how the boots are art museum perfect, as well as warm, and created not from a chart of foot sizes, but from a sketch of her own foot.
In her latest e-mail, Naomi asked me to send her an outline of my feet, because she wanted to send me a locally made present.
One requirement was that someone other than myself do the sketch (apparently it's difficult to accurately sketch your feet yourself).
My husband Lamont carefully outlined my bare feet on two blank sheets of paper. I added an inches scale to the paper to ensure accuracy as it took its 4,000 mile electronic journey. Then I scanned the sheet, distilled it into a PDF document, and e-mailed it to Naomi.
Here is a small version of the outline of my right foot.
So by these electronic means, we ended up with the most traditional of slippers.
Within about two weeks, I had in my hands handmade, custom-fitted slippers made by Pansey Lupie of Tuntituliak, a Native village of 370 in the flat, windswept Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. They arrived quite quickly by Priority Mail.
Naomi told me that Pansey, shown below with the tops of my very own slippers in her hand, comes into Bethel frequently, seeking sewing work. As for my slippers, they "are made of seal and rimmed in beaver," Naomi e-mailed me. Pansey "dyed a front portion, turned inside out, from seal. It's all hand-sewn."
It was wonderful to slip these on and feel them fit completely accurately. They are very soft and almost weightless, and drew impressed remarks from postal workers Joanne and Calandra when I retrieved them at my Post Office box. Also, the slippers grip our wood stairs, which can be killer slippery. Almost lliterally so -- I went airborne, with our poor cat Casey in my arms, going down the steps in new soccer socks, right after they were polyurethaned. That will no longer be a problem with these sealskin soles.
Top, Pansey Lupie shown in Bethel, Alaska, with just the tops showing of the slippers she custom made for me. Below, the slippers in action, on my feet in my office here in Baltimore.
One final note, these slippers need to be kept away from your dogs or cats. I was warned by Naomi that her dog was attracted to the natural fur of these slippers and she had to keep them up on a dresser. In our case, our young kitten, Olivia, rather than the dogs, drags them off the shoe shelf by the front door, into the dining room, to play with them. They now reside in a cubby where she can't quite reach them.
Anyone interested in ordering a pair of handsewn slippers from Pansey can write to her, perhaps enclosing an outline of EACH foot. You will have to ask her about prices. She doesn't speak English, but has access to interpreters. Address:
Pansey Lupie
P.O. Box 8102
Tuntituliak, Ak 99680
With my grandmother having been a seamstress, I have a good deal of respect and awe for the craft of making fine, custom clothing. I agree with Naomi, who wrote of her boots,
there's an element of whole-body comfort in these piluguug [women's boots] ... as if a massage is going on down there in my feet as I write this. The tradition and scientific knowlege for making Yup'ik clothing and tools exists still, and may it go on forever.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:56 PM in Alaska
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July 27, 2004
Heat wave in Barrow, Alaska
I stand in front of the Barrow welcome sign, between two jawbones taken from bowhead whales.
I am incredibly behind on filing my experiences in Alaska in Denali and Anchorage, and now I have been in Barrow, the northernmost point in the United States, for five days, and I am behind on describing this remarkable place, too!
So I will try to file 2 photos quickly, and post a story I wrote for this week's Arctic Sounder, the local paper. It follows below.
Barrow basks in ‘heat wave’
Friday sets record of 70 degrees
By Jeannette Belliveau
Arctic Sounder
A sailboat bobs at anchor, “coconut palms” sway under a limitless azure sky and families in shorts and T-shirts hold beach barbeques and wade in crystalline water.
The images may conjure up the French Riviera.
But this was the remarkable scene in Barrow -- where the “palm trees” are actually made of Arctic driftwood with baleen fronds -- as a heat wave of sorts began Thursday, July 22, when the mercury hit 60 degrees, and continued through the weekend.
Friday was hotter still, setting an all-time mark of 70 degrees. For once, Barrow set a record for heat rather than cold.
It was the warmest July 23 since 1920, when the Department of Agriculture meteorologists began keeping records for Barrow. The previous record of 69 was set in 1981.
Saturday reached 61, and Sunday’s 66 degrees brought droves of families to the beach for wading. Monday, the mercury hit 67.
The average monthly high for July is 46.5 degrees, according to Dave Stricklan of the National Weather Service office in Barrow. Prior to the heat wave, most daily highs in July had ranged from the mid-40s to the mid-50s.
Stricklan personally fielded nearly 10 calls an hour during the fine weather as local boaters called him directly. The meteorologist answered their questions about the forecast, the wind (a gentle five- to 10-knot easterly) and visibility (unlimited on Saturday).
“People call for info,” Stricklan said. “I don’t think they’d appreciate a recording up here, and it’s nice to talk to them. People are going out in boats hunting. If we have good weather, they want to know when it’s going to change.”
Many residents fired up their outboards and set off for seal and walrus on the ice floes about two miles offshore, passing a small white yacht bearing a couple from Australia en route to Nome. Other folks strapped on rifles and hopped into their four-wheelers to seek duck and caribou on the tundra.
Two students from Ipalook Elementary School, Faith Tyson, 9, and Taryn McKenzie, 10, clambered in T-shirts on the struts supporting the bridge between Tasigarook and Isatkoak lagoons.
“It’s over 60 degrees, and I’m burning up,” Taryn said. “When it’s really nice, we don’t wear sweaters.”
Tourists who had traveled hundreds of miles to experience the Arctic North seem both perplexed and delighted. It was the kind of weather for which most people travel to Florida in the winter, except more comfortable, with low humidity.
“I thought we’d have snow on the ground,” said Dorothy Manns of Airville, Pa., Thursday, waiting beside the Tundra Tours bus outside the Top of the World Hotel.
“We picked the best day,” added Glady Miller of Lakewood, Wash. “It”s just gorgeous now.”
At the Inupiat Heritage Center, the next stop for the tourists, the faces of the performers in the Barrow Native Dance Club shone lightly with perspiration. “Whew, it’s hot,” one commented after enacting a walrus kill and other routines.
By day three of the heat wave, Saturday, most of the town was talking about the weather.
“I love it,” said Alice Brower, born and raised in Barrow and an assistant logistics coordinator at the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. “When I was a little kid, the weather used to be good. I’d go out and play every day and didn’t know when to go home because it was always lit. For the last four or five years, it’s been dark and cruddy” in the summer.
“Everyone in town has been enjoying it, going out and boating,” Brower added. “A lot of people got their fishnets out and are going rod-and-reeling.”
Residents who had moved to the northernmost point in Alaska precisely because it was cold held a different view.
“It’s horrible,” said Helen Barton, who has been coming to Barrow for 11 summers to house sit and pet sit, leaving behind Binghamton, N.Y. “I wish it was cold with 20 feet of ice. The colder the better. I can’t stand hot weather.”
“It’s too hot,” agreed Dottie Riquier, originally from Massachusetts, as she stood outside the Tuzzy Library. “You don’t move here unless you like it cold -- cold and windy.”
As Mike Stotts, born and raised in Barrow, pumped gas into his truck, he chatted to an acquaintance. “It’s beautiful, I feel like doing nothing. It’s hard to believe that in 120 days it’ll be pitch black and 50 below zero. This is unbelievable.”
On day four of the heat wave, Sarah Nicely, strolling on the beach Sunday afternoon with her family, said, “I’ve lived here since ’83, and it’s amazing. It’s wonderful, beautiful weather.”
On a bluff near the airport runway, Bunna Edwardson of Arctic Adventures led a group of tourists in spotting a quartet of gray whales, spouting and sounding offshore.
“It’s too hot,” he said. “I’m gonna jump in (the sea) later. It’s a scorcher.”
Meteorologist Stricklan confirmed that some previous years have been quite a bit danker. In July 2000, it rained almost every day. In July 2003, “only two days was it not overcast.”
The reason for the beautiful days this July? “We’ve got a weak high pressure system over us,” Stricklan said ... in other words, the “lack of a weather system” brought wonderful weather.
Or “a scorcher,” depending on your point of view.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:17 PM in Alaska
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July 14, 2004
Iditarod Headquarters
Photo by Jeannette Belliveau
Sled dogs at the Iditarod Headquarters crane their heads to see if a run of the tourist sled is imminent.
On the weekend of July 9-11, my hosts Darrell and Rose and I began the trip up to Talkeetna for a flight-seeing trip to Denali.
On the way we stopped in Wasilla to visit the Iditarod Headquarters. Here are its sled dogs waiting to give a $5 ride to tourists on a wheeled wagon, it being summertime the option of a sled with runners is not practical.
The dogs slumber quite out of it until four tourists are loaded on the sled and a ride appears imminent. Then they scramble to their feet, some so thrilled they stand on their hind legs and pirouette. The ride is over in a heartbeat, as the dogs race at what feels like 20 mph on a circular path at the headquarters.
Inside the main building are stuffed past Iditarod champions, framed photographs and a room where a video contains aerial shots of the race. One segment captured the grandeur of the scenery as the mushers pass alone through towering mountains with no sign of human development.
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:13 PM in Alaska
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Flight-seeing on Denali
Photo by Jeannette Belliveau
Shown above: The icefall of the Ruth Glacier emerging from Denali, North America's highest peak. The glacier turns into a jumble as it crosses a rapidly descending slope.
On July 9 at 8:30 a.m., I took a flight-seeing tour with K2 Aviation in Talkeetna. I signed up for the cheapest, simplest tour, the "blue" McKinley experience tour, for $120 for a one-hour flight (normally $140, but I found a $20 off coupon on their flier picked up at the Visitor Information Center in Anchorage.
Three retirees from Pennsylvania and myself got ready to board our Piper Cherokee with pilot Rick Hortsmann, "pilot / musher," of Willow, who with his thick bush beard and Southern California manner of speaking seems like a cross between a mountain man and a latter version of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. "I was a Navy pilot for 27 years," he announced. Trying to set us at ease, he added, "I'm a cautious, old pilot."
"No barrel rolls, then," said a white-haired passenger, one of the retirees.
"No," Rick confirmed.
As did my missionary pilot, Emile Borne, in Borneo (described in An Amateur's Guide to the Planet), Rick showed us where the first aid kit and emergency transponder were located. I was as usual very nervous about going up in a small plane, but successfully kept my emotions in check so as to enjoy the experience. We loaded up, myself beside Rick in front, the retirees in the second and third rows of the Cherokee.
We took off and immediately found ourselves above a tangle of three wide, shallow rivers, the Talkeetna, meaning (according to Rick) "river of plenty," the Susitna, appropriately "river of islands," and the Chulitna, "river of sticks."
I had a brief moment of panic after takeoff. "I hate mountains," I thought to myself. They look dark and dangerous to a flat-lander such as myself, happier with hills and greenery than vertical granite. I said a quick prayer and then settled down.
Rick made a running commentary over his headset, and the passengers also wore headsets to listen and to ask questions. This worked well given the high level of engine noise.
"Talkeetna is a large airport by Alaska standards," Rick noted, as we left the airplane parking strip and turned into the top of a T junction, where the main runway lay. "Two Kilo Tango," he reported to the "tower," as we taxied into position for takeoff.
The Cherokee took off and slowly gained altitude. "We're 60 miles from the Summit, and 22 miles from the foothills," Rick said, and a dark brooding range appeared to our northwest. Below, we could see the Parks Highway, the road, two lanes in this stretch, linking Anchorage and Fairbanks. The jumble of rivers ran in swooping serpentines (just like in lowland Borneo), and lakes, some with a single home or lodge on the bank, dotted the landscape.
"It's 5,500 miles west, to [St.] Petersburg, Russia, until you hit the next road system to the Parks Highway," Rick said. "We're at 4,000 feet of altitude now. The glaciers that carved this valley were 4,000 feet deep," he added, inviting us to imagine the colossal depth of the rivers of ice that created much of our view.
We passed into the mountain range above the toe of the Ruth Glacier, 3-1/2 miles wide. "When I came up here, I expected to see a white, snowy glacier," Rick noted, as we gazed upon dirt and debris that makes the bottom of the glacier an ugly mess compared to the top.
The Ruth Glacier, he said, is 35 miles long, 1.2 to 3.5 miles wide, and moves 4 feet a day at the top. Rick stated that it had carved a gorge 9,000 feet deep out of "solid granite," creating the deepest land depression on the Earth's surface (although some ocean trenches are deeper).
In winter, the glacier lies under 30 to 40 feet of snow, according to the pilot. We moved along to the Backside Glacier.
Rick put "Tribute" by Yanni onto the airline CD player. "Anyone doesn't like the music?" he asked. Yuck, I thought silently. "I think it adds to the Imax theater effect," Rick added, to a resounding silence from our group. I thought about the frequent and trite observation, often derided by literary travel writers, that most anything dramatic or interesting "is like a movie," when obviously it is movies that should be imitating real life, not the other way around.
Underneath the dirty lower sections of a glacier, Rick said, is 500 feet of ice, with water (the beginnings of the rivers born of many a glacier) running underneath the ice. "It's the water running underneath that makes sinkholes," he said.
Sinkholes hundreds of feet deep appeared toward the very bottom of the sinkhole, and then a boil looking like Scylla churned mud dramatically skyward.
A cloud ceiling of 9,000 feet prevented us from taking the advertised route up the Ruth Glacier, through the Great Gorge and the Don Sheldon Amphitheater on the flanks of Denali, and back the Tokostina Glacier, so we turned from the Ruth Glacier back to Talkeenta.
Photo by Jeannette Belliveau
A view of the Tokosha Mountains, a small range arising from the foothills south of Denali.
On less sunny days, the flight-seeing trip is shorter, but still arguably worthwhile for the unique view even of part of the range. That is a debatable point, however, as the mountain is hidden two days out of three, making safe flying on the advertised routes not about to happen.
Rick told us flying back to the sirport that he had been in Alaska for 10 years and runs a company called Wings and Paws, offering flight-seeing and dogsled rides with his 22 furry "children." He has entered the famous Iditarod sled race.
How did he do? "I finished," he said, pausing for dramatic effect ... "alive."
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:12 PM in Alaska
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July 6, 2004
Alaska Native Heritage Center
Well, after a near-lifetime of avoiding using the word "native" in respect to indigenous people, I am learning that this is the preferred term up here in Alaska.
Yesterday, my colleague Rose and I visited the Alaska Native Heritage Center here in Anchorage. Anyone with a bit of amateur anthropologist (or geographer) in them will love the center. Outdoor replicas of living quarters appear for Alaska's Indians, the Athabascans; for its Eskimo peoples, the Yup'ik and Cup'ik, Inupiaq, and Aleut and Alitiiq; and the Tlingit and related tribes who share the Northwest Coast culture of the Seattle area Indians.
Eskimos apparently entered their half-buried timber homes via tunnels about four feet high, with chambers leading off for food. The tunnels prevented the cold from entering the structure. In Alaska, they did not build igloos (this was a feature of Canadian natives).
The Tlingit structures of cedar are gorgeous and smell wondeful, and the center features a nearby totem pole. The planking of the outside walls is gappy during the summer, allowing ventilation, and swells shut so the sides of the planks shut during winter, keeping the heat in.
Two aspects of our visit stood out. First, native Alaskan teens serve as guides to the structure, and may be the most charming young people in the 50 states. They really made the visit for me. A young girl named Lisa, with a sweet smile, showed us a tunic her grand-mother made her. Others showed us otter skins, steps to the roof made of notched logs, grass baskets and similar paraphernalia.
Second, I wonder again, as I did in my book An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, about the links of Indonesian Borneo to the rest of the world. In Amateur, I wrote of the links between Borneo and Polynesia to the east and Madagascar to the west. Looking at native Alaskan tribal artifacts, I saw a lot of similarity between baskets, notched log ladders, and communal houses to aspects of Borneo.
Is Borneo the cultural template for most of the Pacific rim? If so, what an incredible sphere of influence for these highland island people.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:30 AM in Alaska
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July 1, 2004
Entering moose country
I find myself quite abruptly in Anchorage, Alaska, helping my friend and former Baltimore Sun colleague Rose Ragsdale with design and editing a chain of community newspapers. She is short of staff and called me in to help, and I found myself on an airplane nine days later.
Rose picked me up at the airport on Monday and we went straight from the airport to work, laying out a small newspaper called the Tundra Drums, which serves a community near where the Yukon River enters the ocean, along the western edge of the state. Everyone I met at the office, and talked to on the phone, was extremely nice.
There was a buzz at the office and everyone rushed to the windows, not three hours after I arrived. There was a moose trotting up the street! You have to picture this happening in a large-ish city, very sprawling like Virginia Beach, and the newspaper offices are in an industrial park (kind of like where Army Times is, Lamont) near the city's largest mall.
Today is my fourth day here and I just saw another moose. Rose lent me her Huffy bicycle, and I rode from her house into downtown, and then along the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. About four miles along, I heard a loud crashing in the trees beside the trail, and came to a halt. It was another cow moose, eating leaves. She walked up a slope and starting eating right beside the trail. If I can figure out the technology, I will try to add a digital picture of her to this blog.
As I stopped and watched and photographed her, other bicyclists came upon the area and took pictures as well. Either we are all tourists, or even the locals like seeing moose. Giant mosquitos do tend to settle all over your hands if you keep still, so I eventually headed along.
It feels like it is in the low 60s today. Have not seen the snowcapped mountains that encircle the city yet, because there is a cloud system firmly in place, but it doesn't matter. So far I like getting to know this area based on diving in at the deep end and being here as a worker, much as I was when I lived in England and knew the place in a different way to a tourist.
- posted by jbelliveau at 9:25 PM in Alaska
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